"Louvado seja o Santíssimo Sacramento": o anticomunismo católico e a formação da identidade e da espacialidade norte-riograndense (1934-1937)

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the development of the catholic anticommunism in Brazil between the years of 1934 to 1937, comparing the local to the national level, having as study material the anticommunism widespread in Rio Grande do Norte by the catholic newspaper The Order and the secular newspaper The Republic and, on what concerns the country, by the magazine The Order issued by the Dom Vital Center, in Rio de Janeiro. It’s understood that these productions refers to an anti-communist discourse anchored in political strategies and assumptions that the church sought to leverage. Therefore, it is important to link the understanding of this speech to the Catholic ideas against modernity and its formulations, worked in the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century by the church to understand the specificity of its translation in Brazil. Thus, it is understood that the Catholic anticommunism is only part of the anti-modern discourse translated because of assumptions and strategies that the Church sought to leverage in the 1930s. For this analysis, it was necessary to consider the specific production of the religious field by the theoretical and methodological articulation of Pierre Bourdieu categories 'field' and 'space' and the representation mechanisms at different scales. In that way we see that the relationship between religion and politics were formed from the formulation of a specific type of symbolic capital, adapted to the national experience and local – which, has played a major and central role in the production of space and identity of Rio Grande do Norte in the 1930s.